ALL day, all season, they’d waited for this moment, ached for this moment, even in those long, dark stretches when it seemed their season was careening toward the abyss. Somehow, the Manhattan Jaspers never tumbled into that black hole. Somehow, they kept their legs.

Somehow, they had fought their way to this wonderful basketball moment, with the final seconds of the regular season melting off the clock at Draddy Gymnasium, with the MAAC title about to be theirs, with all but a small pocket of the 2,345 witnesses about to hurdle the press tables and gather for one of the great celebrations you’ll ever see.

“One of the great moments of my life,” sophomore center Arturo Dubois said, shaking his head, the glee of the moment still quaking his knees, the reality of this splendid 78-74 victory over Iona gently taking hold within his heart.

“It was,” Bobby Gonzalez would say, “a great New York day. For one day at least, we were the toughest ticket in town.”

And for one remarkable season the Jaspers have been the toughest team in town, the grittiest gaggle of gamers anywhere within the five boroughs. Iona’s got the better talent, especially since the Jaspers lost C.J. Anderson, their best player, over a month ago. Yesterday, the Gaels had a 68-60 lead and they looked primed to flee to the Westchester County line with the No. 1 seed in the MAAC playoffs in hand.

“We’re supposed to put the game away there,” was Iona coach Jeff Ruland’s hoarse postgame lament. “Not start throwing the ball off the back of our heads.”

More precisely, they shoved the Jaspers one last time to a place with which they’ve grown intimately familiar, a spot where lesser teams wobble and die, where champions refuse to be vanquished. One more time, back the Jaspers came. Mike Konovelchick, wearing a head bandage and looking like a member of the fife-and-drum corps, made the game-tying free throw. Jason Wingate made the tiebreaking lay-up, and four clinching foul shots.

“They’re a blood-and-guts team,” said Gonzalez, his whole life a blood-and-guts gym rat who knows the species well.

New York deserved an afternoon like this, in a basketball place like this, one team from the Bronx and one from the ‘burbs and a whole bunch of city kids reminding us that just because the Knicks have given up the ghost, just because St. John’s is struggling to qualify for its conference tournament, this is still the greatest city on earth in which to watch the city game.

The basketball cognoscenti might have offered up Storrs, Conn., as the place to be yesterday, where Villanova and Connecticut and their mutual March ambitions collided for what was little more than a glorified exhibition game, since what was at stake at Gampel Pavilion was this: absolutely nothing.

At Draddy, the only thing in play was everything. A double-bye in next week’s MAAC Tournament was on the table, which in a one-bid league is a prize plated in platinum, meaning all the Jaspers need now is two wins to qualify for the NCAA. And even if they don’t get them, winning the regular-season title assures them of an NIT berth.

“We were playing for our season,” Kenny Minor said, “and we were playing for the championship of the MAAC.”

They were also playing for the informal championship of New York, on the first day in a good long while when that meant something again. All the important New York gadflies were there, beginning with Howard Garfinkel, the old Five-Star guru. Everywhere you turned you saw Riverside Church jackets, and old Gauchos gear, and people with their faces and torsos painted either green-and-white or maroon-and-gold.

“SAFETY SCHOOL!” the Manhattan fans chanted at the Iona cheering section.

“SO ARE YOU!” retorted the invaders from New Rochelle.

A perfect soundtrack on a perfect basketball afternoon in New York City. There’s a good chance these teams will meet again soon, with even more at stake. Somehow, it won’t seem the same. That game would be in Albany, far removed from the city that would know how to treat that match-up right. Too bad.